A bold idea for alleviating Amazon guilt from the comfort of your couch
A two-paragraph item about Bubble Wrap in my column last Sunday prompted a surprisingly critical response from readers.
The item simply noted that, after one of my sons recently ordered cushioned wrapping from Amazon — Bubble Wrap is a registered trademark of Sealed Air Corp. of Charlotte, North Carolina, and should always be capitalized — the roll arrived protected inside the box by air pillow inserts.
My purpose was to highlight wretched excess in mail-order packaging. But many readers told me they saw instead a wretched neglect of local merchants — the bricks-and-mortar retailers who provide jobs for people in the community, who support the local tax base and who stock mailing supplies so customers can purchase them at a moment’s notice.
Why didn’t my son just go to a nearby store to get his Bubble Wrap?
You know the two-part answer, but I’ll spell it out anyway:
1. Convenience. Making sure a certain store carries a particular product, then getting there and back, can easily eat up an hour. Ordering online can be accomplished in a few minutes and works fine as long as you don’t need the product immediately.
2. Selection. Amazon returns 700 results in a site search for Bubble Wrap, which is, admittedly, more daunting than impressive.
Notice I didn’t mention price. Goods often sell for less from online retailers, but not always. My son spent about $12 to meet his cushioning needs for transporting a computer monitor to his home in New York City, but an Office Depot about 4 miles away could have met them for about $6.
I find that the topic of Amazon guilt comes up fairly often these days in conversations with family and friends. Yes, the virtuous soul will sacrifice time, energy and perhaps money to go out and patronize nearby stores, but online shopping is so much easier and therefore so terribly tempting. The devil on your shoulder says,
“Just click and be done with it!”
So here’s an idea (my dad says he thought of it first so I’ll give him the credit in honor of his 90th birthday next month): The Amazon Guilt Assuagement Donation, or AGAD, an option afforded to customers on every transaction to add a percentage of the total of the overall charge and designate that amount as a donation to a local retailer, ideally one that sells a similar product.
For example, under AGAD, my son could easily have directed a, say, 10% tip — $1.20 — to the nearest Office Depot, just for being there next time we have an urgent need for, say, a printer cartridge; just for employing Chicagoans; just for generating revenue that helps keep government running.
Who picks the beneficiary? He does. Who funnels his AGAD into the proper account? Amazon (for a tiny handling fee).
Why would Amazon participate in a program that directs cash to establishments that compete with it? Because local and online retail are symbiotic, part of an interdependent economy in which desires are generated and needs are met. And because reducing Amazon guilt stands to increase Amazon sales.
Amazon’s media relations department did not respond to several requests for comment on AGAD. Response to the idea on Facebook, where I floated it twice in April, ranged from enthusiastic to skeptical, with some challenging me on the admittedly hazy logistics and others wondering if modest donations would make much of a positive difference to a store, or even become a negative if it drove even more traffic online.
Interspersed with these huzzahs and critiques was a great deal of pure Amazon hatred.
Those who are alarmed and angry at the company’s creeping domination and labor practices are in full boycott mode and therefore contemptuous of any idea that would ease the consciences of a click shopper. This faction believes Amazon customers should wallow in their guilt and mend their purchasing ways, not aim for a lazy win-win.
The Illinois Retail Merchants Association was also cool to AGAD. Rob Karr, the association’s president and CEO, said an estimated 30,000 individuals and businesses in Illinois sell their goods through Amazon, so tipping them wouldn’t make much sense.
But more to the point, Karr said, such donations would be highly unlikely to replace the value of the sale and the ancillary sales (the impulse purchase of, say, pens and sticky notes when one goes to the store to buy Bubble Wrap).
He dismissed the idea of sustaining businesses with charity. If shoppers “intend to keep small brick-and-mortar businesses around, they will share some of that spending by being their customers,” he said.
All this woolgathering about AGAD has inspired me to fire up the Idea Oven again for old time’s sake. The Idea Oven
— a suggestion box for half-baked whims, inspirations and notions for new products, businesses or innovations — was a regular feature in this column at the turn of the century (yes, this century, smart aleck).
My father, who should talk, referred to it as a “grab bag of bizarre ideas.”
Email yours to the address at the end of this column with “Idea Oven” in the subject line.
Re: Tweets
Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Monday described people who wear face coverings outdoors to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus as “zealots” and “neurotics.” He urged his viewers to combat this “repulsive” practice by confronting them on the street with, “‘would you please take off your mask? … Your mask is making me uncomfortable.”
The risk of outdoor transmission, particularly from pedestrian to pedestrian, is vanishingly low, to be sure. But the mask is a reminder that the pandemic is still with us and a symbol that wearers, even those of us doubly vaccinated, care about the health of others. What seems to bother Carlson and many other maskphobes is that face coverings remind them of rejected President Donald Trump’s feckless and fatal denialism about COVID-19 that included his churlish refusal to mask up in public.
Novelist Jason Miller (@Longwall26) alluded to firearm zealotry in crisply summing up the irony of Carlson’s rant in his winning entry in this week’s reader poll to select the funniest tweet: “The party of open carry wants you to know your mask is making them uncomfortable.”
The poll appears at chicagotribune.com/ zorn, where you can read all the finalists. For an early alert when each new poll is posted, sign up for the Change of Subject email newsletter at chicagotribune.com/ newsletters.
Join me and the other regular panelists every week on The Mincing Rascals, a news-review podcast from WGN-plus that posts Thursday afternoons.